


Rubicon

by oneiriad



Category: Jumanji (1995)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28133967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneiriad/pseuds/oneiriad
Summary: In another, kinder world Alan Parrish's final roll of the dice won the game. This is not that world.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Rubicon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LeBibish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeBibish/gifts).



The second die falls and keeps falling for what seems like an eternity. Alan can hear it, fainter and fainter upon every impact, and finally not at all.

Finally his token moves.

Closer and closer to the final space, closer still, almost there and then…

Not.

He thinks the noise he suppresses might be a sob, as the elephant stops moving just one move from victory. But maybe he’s just crying, because surely he’s been shot by now. Surely.

“Well, boy? Read the damn thing, so we can get on with our day!” Van Pelt’s voice is dripping impatience, and he’s gesturing down towards the board with his futuristic rifle.

Alan glances down and letters swim into existence, conveniently large and easy to read. He swallows, his throat abruptly dry, then starts reading the verse.

“So stumbling near, Yet far away, Who knows - you might be here to stay?”

Van Pelt turns away, looking disgusted and going “Oh, drat it all!” and Alan has a moment to imagine that everything is going to be okay after all - then he registers the wind howling, a hurricane roar. A familiar roar.

He looks down at his own hands and he really does sob this time at the sight of his hands melting, exactly the way he’s been seeing in his nightmares these last many years. He looks around to find Sarah, to say goodbye - only to realize to his horror that this time, she is also melting right before his eyes. Around him the world starts to spin, everywhere he looks is melting, and the only thing he can hear is the howling wind drowning out his own screams.

*******

… I don’t remember arriving in Jumanji. This makes perfect sense, as I had been poisoned by a sleeper vine mere minutes before the transfer happened.

I remember waking in Jumanji.

There were noises. Birds, buzzing insects, something large moving not too far away. The gibbering of monkeys from somewhere above us and a banging sound from below. And Peter, who greeted me sitting up with excitedly exclaiming “You’re awake! You’re okay!” and hugging me.

I don’t know how long I had been unconscious. Peter didn’t have a watch, and neither Alan nor Sarah were quite themselves those first couple of days.

At least Van Pelt was nowhere in sight.

Anyway, the point is, I don’t know how long it had been or how long the banging noise from below had been sounding, but seeing as nobody else was going to, I gathered my courage, grabbed Peter’s hand and went down the stairs to investigate.

Which was right about when the banging was replaced with an almighty crash.

We peeked cautiously around the corner, prepared for some new jungle horror to have slunk inside - and were greeted by the sight of Officer Bentley helping Aunt Nora climb through the shattered remains of the cupboard door.

They both looked up when Peter tore his hand away from me, running to embrace Aunt Nora, crying “sorry, sorry, sorry” as he went…

*******

_The boy doesn’t remember falling asleep that first night._

_When he tries he remembers the first hours he spent in Jumanji. Remembers running through the jungle, stumbling over roots and things that moved and rumbled when he tripped against their not-hard-enough bodies. Remembers eventually hiding in a tiny hollow beneath some giant roots, his heart pounding like drums in his ears._

_He remembers waking, eventually, day having happened to the jungle while he was unconscious._

_But he does not recall ever actually falling asleep._

_He remembers things coming sniffing around, things he dared not glance at for fear that they might in turn spot him, eat him. He remembers being passed by._

_Far, far later, when he is no longer a boy, he’ll remember and think that this was not some happy accident. If the game had wanted him dead that first night, he’d have ended his days in some belly or ten._

_But Jumanji didn’t want him dead, not then. It wanted him to wait his turn._

*******

… Eventually the adults decided that we’d all go.

Officer Bentley was the one most in favour of only bringing the most able on an expedition into the jungle, but that would require either a safe place for the rest of us to hide in - which there was not, especially since we had had to abandon the house to the lion - or that somebody able would need to stay behind to keep us safe.

Of course Alan couldn’t stay behind, since he was both the one who knew where to go and the one who knew the most about surviving in the jungle, and to be honest I don’t think Officer Bentley trusted Alan to go off on his own.

So, in the end, we all went.

Each of us carried a large kitchen knife, bags with what food we had found in the kitchen distributed among us and some sort of bottle filled with water. Sarah and Aunt Nora both carried tents and blankets as well.

Alan carried the game, closed and wrapped in fabric, one die short. We’d looked and looked until we had to leave the house, but it simply hadn’t turned up.

I don’t know what travelling through a normal jungle is like.

Travelling through Jumanji was hot and sweaty and scratchy. None of us had clothes remotely suitable for the tropics, not even Alan, though he’d recovered his odd leaf cape before we left the house. There weren’t any proper paths, just animal tracks, and ever so often we had to take detours. At one point, Alan pointed out a pile of animal dung and explained to me and Peter that that was from a hippo and if we valued our lives we’d never cross a hippo’s path.

On the first day of travel Peter started limping. On the second, he discarded his shoes and I tried not to look at his hairy feet. On the third day… on the third day he climbed a tree and started leaping from tree to tree, and didn’t come down until we made camp for the night.

We could hear his laughter like shrieks as we trudged through Jumanji.

On the sixth day we arrived at Alan’s house.

It looked like a lair built by a kid. Which, in retrospect, it was. It was surrounded by thorny bushes and branches, and the only way in was to crawl through a particular narrow path. If you had slightly too broad shoulders, like Officer Bentley, you’d get scratched.

Inside was mostly dark and mostly dry. There really wasn’t much of anything, not even space, and it certainly wouldn’t work as any sort of home for six people, even if two of us were still kids. In the end we gathered what seemed useful - in particular the maps Alan had told us he’d stolen from Van Pelt years before - and went looking for a reasonable campsite to settle down and discuss what to do next…

*******

_The first couple of years the boy spent his nights in a tiny cave halfway down a cliffside. It was barely large enough that a boy might worm inside, making it safe from the cats and bears and other things in the jungle._

_It was also dark and there was something squishy inside that he fervently hoped was just rotting leaves._

_Eventually he had his growth spurt._

_Trying to make a home in Jumanji was not exactly easy. It had to be, above all else, safe. So he built with thorns and spikes, layer upon layer, to get a place where he’d be safe._

_The first “house” he lost in a forest fire, the second to a stampede. He got a little better every time, even started putting together furniture, using vines and pieces of wood to build a bedframe of sorts and a rocky table and chair._

_“It’s not much, but it’s home,” he told himself, sitting down and eating his dinner in the light filtering down from the holes he had left in the roof._

_He cried himself to sleep that night for the first time in weeks._

*******

… The tree we settled on was the height of a small mountain, or so it seemed to me.

Officer Bentley, it had turned out, had worked a lot of different jobs in his life, both before and after his time at Alan’s dad’s factory - and he was good at stuff. He made the rope ladder that Peter climbed up and secured and he made a sort of pulley system out of ropes and Alan’s old bicycle which allowed us to bring the building materials up to the place where three massive branches split out from the trunk close enough together to make a platform.

We scavenged all we could from the house - furniture, supplies, kitchen utensils. We found all sorts of useful stuff in the attic - even an entire canoe Alan vaguely remembered had been used for a Yellowstone holiday when he was very little.

The last couple of trips to the house was just Officer Bentley and Alan. The night after they returned from what would prove to be the second-to-last scavenging trip, Officer Bentley told us how, as they removed the few windows still intact, the vines had climbed up to imitate the windows.

The last trip they returned with Officer’s Bentley’s arm tightly bound in shredded, pink sheets. It was more than a month before we could stop changing the bandages, boiling the used ones in one of the scavenged pots until they were clean enough to reuse.

Work went slower after that, but eventually our tree house was finished.

It felt safe up there.

We made vegetable plots a little distance from the tree, where the plants would not grow in shadow, and surrounded them with thorns to keep the animals out. We fished in the nearby river - usually we used nets, but Alan taught us all how to catch fish by hand. Sometimes he and Officer Bentley went out, spears made out of kitchen knives strapped to long sticks in their hands, and brought back some animal or other.

As an experiment, Sarah planted citrus fruit in hollow bits of our trees branches, and actually managed to grow oranges and lemons right up there with us.

We managed.

We managed for a long time, counting the days as notches on the doorframe, counting the years as new sets of clothes for me and - sometimes, when Aunt Nora insisted - Peter.

We managed to live in Jumanji, never seeing another human. Even Van Pelt seemed to have disappeared, an expedition to where Alan knew his campsite to be turning up a deserted clearing and nothing more.

And then one day Aunt Nora was stung by a giant mosquito…

*******

_The boy who was no longer quite a boy woke in a bed._

_For a moment he lay there, eyes closed, imagining that it had all been a bad dream. Today he was going to get up and go to school, and after school he’d go visit Dad at the factory. Perhaps talk him into leaving early to play with him in the park, the way they sometimes did when he had been small._

_Then he opened his eyes and looked at the tent._

_“Good, you’re awake,” said a voice that nearly made him bolt - except he found that he barely had the strength to sit up, let alone jump out of the camp bed he was lying on._

_“Eat up,” Van Pelt commanded, putting a plate on the tiny table next to the bed. The smell made the boy’s stomach growl._

_“Why am I not dead?” he asked, because yes, he was hungry, but not hungry enough to trust the charity of this man._

_“What? You expected me to leave the best chance at some decent sport I’ve had in years to rot from the jungle fever? Don’t be daft, boy.”_

_The boy didn’t actually sit up and reach for the plate until Van Pelt had left the tent. The food was - probably not delicious, but it was cooked. He’d been surviving on fruit and stolen eggs and the occasional raw fish for years. A plate of crunchy bacon and toast and beans and all manner of fried things?_

_The boy gobbled it up._

_He snuck out of the camp three days later, legs trembling under him, while Van Pelt lay snoring - or possibly just pretending to snore. Along the way, he stole the still wet laundry drying on a line behind the tent._

_He wore those clothes for the better part of a year until his meager skills could no longer keep the rags together._

*******

… By the time Aunt Nora was able to climb down the rope ladder on her own, while Officer Bentley - or Carl, as we’d all long since taken to calling him - stood ready on the ground to catch her if she slipped - by that time we’d all started discussing Jumanji and more precisely how to get out of it a lot more seriously.

It was obvious that if we stayed here, eventually we’d die - eaten by a predator like the leopard that had made its way into our treehouse two years before or stomped to death by something huge and herbivorous and aggresive or simply stung to death by something poisonous.

Our only chance to survive Jumanji was to escape.

Of course, we’d tried to finish the game on and off over the years, but without both dice, the tokens simply refused to move. I’d rolled and rolled that single die, to no avail. We’d braved the old house many times early on and searched, but the lost die was never found. We’d tried replacing it, carving new dice of wood, of bone, of ivory gathered from an elephant graveyard marked on the Van Pelt maps, but nothing worked.

The crocodile token stood as unmoving as it had for years.

We’d tried exploring Jumanji, following the maps and trailing up and down the river, but there was nothing to be found. Eventually, the paths would lead to steep cliffs or plummeting waterfalls, stopping further exploration in its tracks. One promising pathway up a mountain led straight to a cave full of gigantic snakes.

There was no other way out than to finish the game, and we couldn’t.

And even if we did - what would that mean for Carl and Aunt Nora? They weren’t active players in the game, they didn’t have tokens refusing to move, waiting for a dice roll that would never come.

If we managed to escape, if we rolled the dice and Jumanji let us out - would it keep them?

Yet there was no way to add two extra tokens to the game, no extra paths for them to take.

At least - not on that board…

*******

_On that day the man had taken a look at his dwindling supplies and determined that he could no longer postpone it. If he wanted more meat, he’d need to go hunting for it._

_He prepared himself - he put on his big leaf rain-cape in expectation of the day’s downpour, he stuck his best knife - the one he’d carefully, after many attempts, managed to sharpen to a point - in his belt. He even made sure he had the sorry remains of his glasses with him, in case this would be the time he finally figured out how to start a fire with them._

_He had many regrets in life. Adamantly refusing to join the local boy scouts when he had the chance had been one for years._

_He intended to head out towards where he’d seen the lion droppings two days ago. They’d presumably still be around, and if he was lucky, they’d have killed more than they could eat. If not, well - if not, he’d have to go cover his trap and hope he didn’t get kicked by a zebra or mauled by a wildebeest when he tried to spook them into running across it._

_He glanced back at his home as he left the small clearing. It looked nice and safe. With a little luck, he’d be back in a few days with meat to dry._

*******

… Carl carved the new tokens - a tiny police car from one of the ebony keys on the piano that had stood in the house for himself and a tiny ivory house from another key for Aunt Nora. From the same keys he carved new dice - many-sided things from some game his younger cousin Andy apparently loved to play - as different from Jumanji as we could make them.

The board we carved from pieces of wood fetched from the house, and we let ourselves be inspired by the small pile of semi-rotten and dusty board games we’d scrounged from the attic, and from the small maps of Brantford that Aunt Nora had kept in a pile, all ready to hand out to guests once the bed and breakfast had opened.

We all took turns decorating the board and writing on the card-sized bits of paper we’d cut out of the front and back of the books still lying around in the house, filling them with badly rhyming memories of the town. Admittedly, Carl and Sarah ended up writing most of them - three of us had barely had time to see the town (and anyway, Peter’s hands weren’t much good for writing anymore) and most of Alan’s described a town that hadn’t existed in years.

We put the board pieces on either side of the opened Jumanji game, we put the new tokens in their starting spaces. We got everything ready, until it all felt right somehow - and then I picked up the new dice and rolled.

Nothing happened.

Eventually everybody stopped crying, and somebody - Sarah, I think - suggested that perhaps the problem was that we weren’t sufficiently in tune with Brantford, here in our treehouse all surrounded by Jumanji.

Perhaps it’d work better if we were to surround ourselves with Brantford. Perhaps it’d work if we took our Jumanji/Brantford game to the old Parrish house and played it there.

It wasn’t like anybody had any better ideas.

At least the lion had died of old age a few years before, so we didn’t have to wait around until it decided to head out to hunt down its supper.

We sat around the board, five of us, in the place that had once upon a time been intended to become our new home. Peter didn’t sit - he climbed the walls and bookcases, swung from vines dangling down from the ceiling and jumped fearlessly into the chasm cutting through the house.

We sat and I rolled the new dice.

It didn’t work.

Sarah cried, and so did Alan. Carl was so pale his skin looked like ash, and Aunt Nora just buried her face in her hands.

Peter tugged at my lion skin skirt to make me look down, holding out something in one of his front paws. A tiny cube.

I reached down, staring at the die offered, and as my fingers closed around it, trembling, Peter shrieked and leapt past me, towards the board. He grabbed the jade monkey token and off he went, screeching and jabbering as he leapt out the nearest window into the jungle.

As if in a trance, I picked up the second die - the die we had had all along - and shook them in the hollow of my hands. Somewhere I could hear the adults talking, and they might have been telling me to stop, but I couldn’t.

I rolled the dice and my token started to slide across the board - then turned, as the board warped in front of my eyes, paths twisting and turning, while our carefully written pile of cards took flight like so many fluttering bats around us, until finally coming to rest on a space that the Jumanji board had never contained before.

Words swam across the hemisphere, and I read them like a spell, for all that they seemed to be a terrible limerick about bicycles.

Then I looked up at a boy about the age I had been when we started playing, a boy I had never seen before.

“Billy?” Alan and Sarah exclaimed, not quite at the same time...

*******

_The man spent less and less time with the other people._

_Partly, it was simply that he’d spent so very many years alone in the jungle. He wasn’t used to people, wasn’t used to talking - or rather, wasn’t used to other people hearing him talk and talking back._

_They were loud when he wanted to sneak, to hide from the predators._

_Partly, it was that by far the most of the people around him - with a very few, unwelcome exceptions - were from the future. And try as he might, the more he spoke with them - even with Carl and Sarah - they simply didn’t make much sense to him. They spoke of movies he’d never seen, sang songs he’d never heard, talked of wars that hadn’t even been fought in his day._

_So he started to wander. To stray. To follow the river, leaving the maps behind - who needed maps, anyway? All he wanted was to get lost in the jungle for a bit._

_Not too lost. He always brought his spear and a supply of freshwater and dried fruit. He always intended to come back. Every time._

_He came upon Van Pelt’s camp one day, just wandering down an animal path and taking a turn and there it was, exactly like he remembered it. He remembered the first time he saw it, the first sign of human life in this cursed place, and how he’d run towards the tent, crying and feeling saved._

_It hadn’t lasted long, back then._

_He approached cautiously, this time. Used the spear to pull aside the tent door before stepping inside._

_It was gloomy inside, the flickering light of the kerosene lamp not quite hiding the sight of Van Pelt._

_He looked - wrong._

_“What’s the matter, boy?” he asked, turning his head towards the man. It made everything slouch._

_“Looks like I should be asking you that,” he replied, trying not to be sick._

_Van Pelt laughed._

_“Haven’t you ever seen a snake shed its skin, boy? That’s all this is. A new hunter for a new day.” He laughed even more as he looked at the man’s horrified expression. “Oh, you idiot boy. Did you still think I was human? Haven’t you realized yet? There are no humans in Jumanji!”_

_The man stopped to puke someplace in the jungle. As he straightened he heard something rustle behind him._

*******

… The first time Billy Jessup came face to face with a great cat he wet himself.

I remember Alan laughing at him, back then. It was an unkind laugh, a man close to fifty laughing at a humiliated boy not even quite a teenager - and yet, all those years stuck in the jungle had left Alan in many ways like a sort of Peter Pan, I suppose.

Never growing up, even as he grew older…

The woman puts down the pen at the end of the sentence. She’s run out of paper and will need to fetch more before she can continue her narrative.

Absentmindedly she reaches out to scratch the tiny, grey-furred monkey curled up on the table next to her unfinished manuscript. He grumbles in his sleep, but when she rises and picks him up, he stirs just enough to wrap himself around her shoulders before settling back down to sleep.

She takes the bridges today. Some days she likes to walk on the forest floor, but today she’s feeling her age, and so she turns away from the ladders and even the kindly offer of the rope sling and wanders out across the chasms between the home trees, heading towards the paper mill. She pulls up the hood of her banana-leaf-cloak as the rain starts dripping about halfway across the third bridge.

It’s just that time of day.

People wave as she walks past, calling out greetings. It’s funny - she used to know each and every person in New Brantford by name. She knew when they came from, what dice throw had brought them here - and then the babies started to get born, and somebody - they never did find out who - found another board game with different verses to read.

And now there’s so many that when somebody calls “Good day, Miss Governor!” all she can do is nod and smile for want of a name on her tongue.

She fetches her paper from the mill, glancing down at the waterfall far beneath her, then detours around the food supply on the way home to pick up something for dinner. She shares a fruit juice icicle from the freezer house with the monkey as they walk back to First Home.

Back in her office - which used to be Mayor Carl’s office a long time ago, back when they still had mayors and still had Carl, back before they had to figure out where to put the cemetery - she puts the monkey back down on the table, chiding him for his laziness.

She doesn’t expect him to answer. After all, he hasn’t spoken in years.


End file.
